Cross-layer reliability evaluation, moving from the hardware architecture to the system level: A CLERECO EU project overview

Advanced computing systems realized in forthcoming technologies hold the promise of a significant increase of computational capabilities. However, the same path that is leading technologies toward these remarkable achievements is also making electronic devices increasingly unreliable. Developing new methods to evaluate the reliability of these systems in an early design stage has the potential to save costs, produce optimized designs and have a positive impact on the product time-to-market. CLERECO European FP7 research project addresses early reliability evaluation with a cross-layer approach across different computing disciplines, across computing system layers and across computing market segments. The fundamental objective of the project is to investigate in depth a methodology to assess system reliability early in the design cycle of the future systems of the emerging computing continuum. This paper presents a general overview of the CLERECO project focusing on the main tools and models that are being developed that could be of interest for the research community and engineering practice

ACTiCLOUD: Enabling the Next Generation of Cloud Applications

Despite their proliferation as a dominant computing paradigm, cloud computing systems lack effective mechanisms to manage their vast amounts of resources efficiently. Resources are stranded and fragmented, ultimately limiting cloud systems' applicability to large classes of critical applications that pose non-moderate resource demands. Eliminating current technological barriers of actual fluidity and scalability of cloud resources is essential to strengthen cloud computing's role as a critical cornerstone for the digital economy. ACTiCLOUD proposes a novel cloud architecture that breaks the existing scale-up and share-nothing barriers and enables the holistic management of physical resources both at the local cloud site and at distributed levels. Specifically, it makes advancements in the cloud resource management stacks by extending state-of-the-art hypervisor technology beyond the physical server boundary and localized cloud management system to provide a holistic resource management within a rack, within a site, and across distributed cloud sites. On top of this, ACTiCLOUD will adapt and optimize system libraries and runtimes (e.g., JVM) as well as ACTiCLOUD-native applications, which are extremely demanding, and critical classes of applications that currently face severe difficulties in matching their resource requirements to state-of-the-art cloud offerings

Acute Epstein-Barr virus infection in two elderly individuals

Most individuals acquire Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection in young age. Because of uncommon presentation and misdiagnosis, clinical manifestations are less well described in older age. We present two cases of elderly patients with predominant symptoms attributed to cold agglutinin haemolytic anaemia due to acute EBV infection without fever, lymphadenopathy, pharyngitis or splenomegaly. We conclude that misleading clinical manifestations are frequent in older individuals and may lead to inappropriate diagnostic invasive procedures

Bayesian network early reliability evaluation analysis for both permanent and transient faults

Analyzing the impact of software execution on the reliability of a complex digital system is an increasing challenging task. Current approaches mainly rely on time consuming fault injections experiments that prevent their usage in the early stage of the design process, when fast estimations are required in order to take design decisions. To cope with these limitations, this paper proposes a statistical reliability analysis model based on Bayesian Networks. The proposed approach is able to estimate system reliability considering both the hardware and the software layer of a system, in presence of hardware transient and permanent faults. In fact, when digital system reliability is under analysis, hardware resources of the processor and instructions of program traces are employed to build a Bayesian Network. Finally, the probability of input errors to alter both the correct behavior of the system and the output of the program is computed. According to experimental results presented in this paper, it can be stated that Bayesian Network model is able to provide accurate reliability estimations in a very short period of time. As a consequence it can be a valid alternative to fault injection, especially in the early stage of the desig

A Bayesian model for system level reliability estimation

Nowadays, the scientific community is looking for ways to understand the effect of software execution on the reliability of a complex system when the hardware layer is unreliable. This paper proposes a statistical reliability analysis model able to estimate system reliability considering both the hardware and the software layer of a system. Bayesian Networks are employed to model hardware resources of the processor and instructions of program traces. They are exploited to investigate the probability of input errors to alter both the correct behavior and the output of the program. Experimental results show that Bayesian networks prove to be a promising model, allowing to get accurate and fast reliability estimations w.r.t. fault injection/simulation approache

Cross-layer reliability evaluation, moving from the hardware architecture to the system level: A CLERECO EU project overview

Advanced computing systems realized in forthcoming technologies hold the promise of a significant increase of computational capabilities. However, the same path that is leading technologies toward these remarkable achievements is also making electronic devices increasingly unreliable. Developing new methods to evaluate the reliability of these systems in an early design stage has the potential to save costs, produce optimized designs and have a positive impact on the product time-to-market. CLERECO European FP7 research project addresses early reliability evaluation with a cross-layer approach across different computing disciplines, across computing system layers and across computing market segments. The fundamental objective of the project is to investigate in depth a methodology to assess system reliability early in the design cycle of the future systems of the emerging computing continuum. This paper presents a general overview of the CLERECO project focusing on the main tools and models that are being developed that could be of interest for the research community and engineering practice. © 2015 Elsevier B.V